John the Baptist Preaching Wilderness
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Mark 1:6
The passage
And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey;
Mark 1:6
About this plate
John stands on a rock at the top left, one arm flung up, a long cross-staff in the other hand, animal skin at his waist. Below him the ground falls away in a slope packed with people: men seated on stones, women with infants, an old man propped on a stick, children. Behind, palms and the flat valley of the Jordan.
The crowd is the argument. Doré has drawn perhaps sixty faces, and almost none of them are looking at John. They talk to each other, stare off, tend to a child, doze. Two or three are rapt. The rest have come out to the desert and are now mostly waiting.
The verse Mark gives is not about the preaching at all. It is a costume note and a menu: camel's hair, a leather girdle, locusts and wild honey. That is the whole of what the King James chooses to tell you about the man at this moment.
Doré takes the hint and draws him accordingly, in skins, on a rock, with nothing behind him but sky and nothing in his hands but wood.
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